FOX

BONES RECAP: Political animals

By Cay | October 10, 2012

Bones 8.04: The Tiger in the Tale

Victim of the Week: A couple has gotten their car stuck in the mud and they are fighting while they attempt to rock/push it out. Unfortunately (and predictably), there happens to be a body buried just below the top layer of mud and the tires spray the man with chucks of the corpse’s head and face, which was disgusting, even by Bones standards. Even worse, the man has swallowed one of the victim’s teeth. Luckily, Brennan doses him with syrup of ipecac under the guise of looking down his throat, so he pukes it up (instantly, which is definitely not how ipecac actually works, but I digress….) Yep, we’re off to a pretty nasty start this week!

Back at the Jeffersonian, they discover a gunshot wound in the victim’s hand and Hodgins finds all kinds of crazy things in the tread of the victim’s boots, which lead them to a fairgrounds that has hosted a Venetian glass show, a gun show, and an exotic animal show recently, among other events. For reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, Angela is feeling somewhat inadequate because Hodgins always comes up with the good evidence and *all* she does is reconstruct faces and sometimes figure out how people died.

In other relationship news, Daisy and Sweets are moving in together (ugh!). It turns out the Sweets is having a bit of cold feet, though. He’s trying to convince himself that it isn’t a big deal, but everyone he talks to disagrees.

Brennan, meanwhile, unlike me, is apparently feeling inspired rather than disgusted with all the election brouhaha and is pondering a run for president in 2016. She spends the episode working on her platform and trying to convince the team why she’d make a great president which included a running (sometimes amusing) commentary on lying, health care, and increasing employment.

Booth and Brennan go out to the fairgrounds to check things out. They meet a worker named Juan who uses day laborers to keep the place running. They show him Angela’s facial reconstructions and it turns out that the victim was one of his best workers, Jared Drew. They investigate him and find a restraining order filed two days before his death by his ex-wife. Drew had lost the hardware store that had been in his family for generations and then couldn’t find work, leading to the failure of their marriage. Judging by her new boyfriend, she didn’t exactly upgrade as he’s an aggressive piece of work. Sweets asks if either of them have a gun and they lawyer up so the interrogation is over.

Tests of animal dung found on the victim contains DNA from a bunch of different exotic animals – monkey, wolf, etc – which isn’t that surprising as he worked cleaning cages during the exotic pet show. We are then treated to a public service announcement by Team Jeffersonian on the inappropriateness of keeping wild animals as pets. Bones and Brennan then question the person who runs the expo and he and Brennan fight about keeping exotic animals as pets.

The team determines that the victim died from a gunshot wound to the face. Apparently the hand was a defensive wound. They also find out that the victim had septic arthritis and find deep scratch marks on the bone around the victim’s shoulder that they suspect introduced the bacteria that led to the sepsis. They find keratin from a cat claw in the scrapes on the bones and the dung had cells from a tiger in it. So the victim was slashed by a tiger and was really sick with sepsis when he was killed, but didn’t visit a hospital. They interview the head of the expo again, but he denies knowing anything about a tiger.

They assume that the victim was killed so no one would find out about the tiger, which is a felony to own. They try to use satellite footage to see if any of the farms near where the victim was found might have a tiger, but the footage isn’t good enough. Hodgins comes to the rescue, though, with a camera attached to a model airplane, which he flies over the farms. One of them definitely has exotic animals on it, which is enough for a warrant (they claim that the footage was from a hobbyist).

Booth and Brennan go to the farm and question the owner, who denies having a tiger. They find a large empty enclosure, however, and then Brennan notices some buzzards circling over a group of trees and they soon find a dead, half-buried tiger being eaten by the birds. Brennan inexplicably comes to pieces at the sight of the dead tiger even though the most horrible of human deaths rarely seems to faze her. The farm owner tells them that he shot the tiger in self defense. He saw an ad in an online forum and bought the tiger sight unseen, dropping off an envelope of money to Juan, the supervisor at the fairgrounds. Two guys delivered it, and one of them, the only one that he saw, looked really sick. The other man didn’t get out of the truck.

Juan tells them that he didn’t know what was in the envelope, he just passed it on to the head of the expo as he was told. He was also asked to send them his best worker, so he sent Drew. Booth and Brennan call the expo head back in for more questioning. He’s pretty sick – Bones thinks he is septic, too, and was infected when a piece of bone from the victim flew back and cut his hand, infecting him with the same bacteria (seriously??) as he shot him. They confront him and he doesn’t deny killing the victim.

After spending all day talking to everyone else but Daisy about moving in with Daisy, Sweets is finally standing at the front steps of their new apartment with her. He asks her about when she thinks that they might get married and she tells him a year, earlier if she gets pregnant. He tells her that he misunderstood the significance of them moving in together and tells her that they are breaking up, then walks away, leaving her standing alone.

My Thoughts: My first impression of the episode was definitely TOO MUCH DAISY, and there definitely was, but after seeing the end, I have hope that maybe we won’t have to see her any more (c’mon, a girl can dream!). While I found the Bones-for-President plotline to be quite amusing, there were definitely bits of the episode that got pretty preachy, especially about the tiger. As an animal lover, I do not agree with keeping those kind of animals in captivity, but Brennan getting so worked up about it seemed out of character to me and having all the characters denounce keeping wild animals as pets seemed forced, like it was FOX’s Exotic Animal Awareness Week, or something. On the plus side, there were a lot of funny lines this week. The next new episode won’t be on until November 5th, so we have a month to discuss the merits of Daisy and Sweets getting back together (or not) and whether we’d actually vote for Bones for President. So, have at it in the comments below!

Memorable Quotes:

…empathy with the middle class… – Booth (reading Brennan’s reasons why she should run for president)
Yes, I worked several minimum wage jobs while on the run- Brennan

When we [men] miss living like pigs, we go camping! – Sweets

Um, the witness isn’t feeling well. He says he swallowed something when he was sprayed with….person – local police officer

Oh yeah, ’cause she was wanted for murder, she took peyote with the Indians, and her dad was a hardcore criminal, I don’t think I should start printing up “Bones for President” campaign buttons anytime soon! – Booth

…a campaign must be designed to persuade the electorate that a candidate is on their side, which means it is sometimes necessary to lie, so my answer is, No, I would not tap your phone – Brennan

Yes, I took your excrement because I wanted to study it – Cam
And she hit the motherlode! – Angela

Tide’s good, flood’s bad. Ask New Orleans! – Hodgins

You’re an atheist, you’re not diplomatic, and you think America is an empire… – Booth
America IS an empire! – Bones
I really, really wouldn’t give you your own army or nuclear weapons! – Booth